Sheila Heti on Tove Jansson

At TheNew Yorker, Sheila Heti takes a closer look at Tove Jansson, who was best known for creating Moomin, but went on to write fiction that wrestled with love and the idea of happiness. “Love, for her, is premised on a delicate balance between the reliable presence of another person and the freedom to inhabit one’s private universe,” writes Heti. “Unlike the intrusive letter writers in ‘Messages,’ who demand a presentation of the self, genuine companionship shields the self, allowing one’s interiority to deepen; this is the alchemy of true mutuality.”

“Do you know the philosopher Slavoj Žižek?” asks John Jeremiah Sullivan in his interview for the LA Review of Books. “He has this thing about love, the evil of love, and he says, I really don’t like love, because what love says is: I pick you out from everything, and I’m going to give you special attention, meaning that everything else is denigrated, and he says there’s something a little evil in that, and in the same way I think that there something a little philistine about lists.”

“After breaking down the data by neighborhood and age group, it became clear: Children’s books are a rarity in high-poverty urban communities. The likelihood that a parent could find a book for purchase in these areas ‘is very slim.’” On book deserts across America.

As titles go, it’s hard to get more straightforward than England and Other Stories, the new collection by Graham Swift. In the Times, Michiko Kakutaniprovides her verdict, lauding Swift for his ability to paint “vistas as panoramic as those in the stories of Alice Munro.”